Abell2744 Y1 is about 2,300 light-years wide, which is 50 times smaller than our Milky Way Galaxy. It is producing about ten times more stars than our Galaxy, as is typical for galaxies in the young Universe.

The galaxy has a redshift of 8, which is a measure of the degree to which its light has been shifted to redder wavelengths due to the expansion of Universe. The farthest confirmed galaxy has a redshift of more than 7.

Abell2744 Y1 was found with the help of NASA’s Spitzer and Hubble Space Telescopes and a gravitational lens produced by the galaxy cluster Abell 2744 – gravity from the mass in the cluster (located about 3.5 billion light-years away) acts to magnify the light of more distant galaxies behind it.